What an excellent argument for the free market this is
Sonia Sodha tells us that:
If the price of a supermarket chicken had risen at the same rate as house prices since the 1960s, it would today cost more than £50
OK. So why doesn’t a chicken cost that? Actually, a free range, organic, heritage breed probably does cost about that at some achingly trendy food purveyor. Or at least closer to that than the price most of us do pay. So the answer about the chicken is that we’re not stuck with only the old-style free range, organic heritage breed. We’ve had, over this time period, a technological revolution in chicken. As we’ve noted before people complain about how cheap chicken is in fact, what with broilers, vast raising sheds and all the rest.
So, why have we had that revolution? Sir Anthony Fisher is a part of it, certainly. Importing that new tech from the US in the post-war years. We never really did have EU stupidities on chicken and eggs as we did beef, butter, wine and olive oil - it wasn’t a traditional peasant occupation, d’ye see? Not in the same way at least. Therefore we never did get quite the same level of planning, government attention and, ahem, better than free market outcomes.
We got, to a very great extent, the free market able to get on with that technological revolution. Most chicken farmers scrape by, there are no excess profits in the system. And we consumers gain cheap chicken for the first time in millennia.
Free markets work.
So, why have house prices risen so much as compared with the cost of chicken? Because we’ve not had a free market in housing, we’ve got all that planning and all that bureaucratic effort to try to reach, ahem, a better than free market outcome. Which clearly and obviously hasn’t worked, has it?
Not free markets don’t work.
The current cultural insistence is that we’ve got to increase the price of food by not having a free market in the production of food. We have a better idea - why not have a free market in housing so as to decrease the cost of that? Blow up the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors. Proper blow up. Kablooie.
Anything else is just for the birds.